This column is an experiment in writing about film: what if, instead of freely choosing which parts of the film to address, I select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case and for future columns, the 10-minute, 40-minute, and 70-minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as a guide to writing about the film, keeping the commentary as close to possible to the frames themselves? No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. Constraint as a form of freedom. Feel free to pick apart the frames even further in the comments.
And so to our first installment.
Starship Troopers (1997, dir. Paul Verhoeven)
10 minutes:
The warrior, Spartan game of retro-future football, as two players vie for the ball, the one in blue diving into the crowd, the other one in a mid-air somersault, like a frozen moment in a circus act. Classic Verhoeven framing and tightly-choreographed chaos. The movie is full of action and violence, and yet not for one moment do we believe that it approximates reality. This artificiality is the movie’s great strength, as opposed to the faux-documentary hyper-realism of Saving Private Ryan (1998), Black Hawk Down (2001), or The Hurt Locker (2008). In this frame, the FIGHT banner hanging on the back wall comments on the very action we see. A satire of fascism, or an endorsement? And then the prominently-placed, ultra-lit endorsements, including AT&T. Product placement, or a mocking of product placement? Verhoeven has it both ways. The tightly-controlled alignment of the color blue, leading our eye to the lower right quadrant: GIANTS. The artificial crowd, in this frozen moment so clearly extras, that the fact they are extras seems to be the point. Forget realism, in whose dark muck we trudge through every day. Starship Troopers is an exaggerated, elongated style of realism, as were the early films of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma.
40 minutes:
The iconography of fascism, ambiguously toyed with in the film. A crane shot, the soldiers the size of toy soldiers. The bright, natural sunlight, casting early morning shadows, towards screen right. Sgt. Zim (Clancy Brown), stands atop the incline, barking instructions for the simulated combat training that is about to begin: “When the game’s over, gentlemen,” he shouts, “you will be firing live ammunition in a simulated combat environment. You will exercise extreme caution on my assault course.” The frame hints at limitless training, the illusion that we are seeing only a small section of an enormous training grounds, with the rope climbers in the background, the small packs of trainees, a mix of gray and brown cement and sand and steel. The color scheme is completely at odds with interior shots at the base, which are drenched in blue and green and red. Are the sets built or existing? The sand pit fighting area looks so fake it could be real.
70 minutes:
Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) floating in a green tank, breathing through a tube, his wounded leg methodically being repaired by some crab-like creature or machine. His friends run by, rapping on the tank, smiling. A fantastically absurd shot, meant to showcase Rico’s body, like a surreal spread in some fashion magazine featuring men with no body hair. I love that the medical personnel are dressed in some sort of white, full-body surgical suits, presumably to keep things sterile, while the two characters in black t-shirts come tearing through, completely contaminating the place, and no one seems to care. There is the publicity of surgery — as Johnny is literally “in the operating theater.” A warning and an invitation: this is what happens when you are wounded (public display and humiliation) and again, this is what happens when you are wounded (you are a hero on display, a spectacle, famous).
And really, life is a spectacle for all these characters in Verhoeven’s films, where nothing is implicit, and all is revealed in every over-lit shot: violence, sex, technology. It is fascism of a different sort: the complete annihilation, not of the bugs (who show up in none of these screen grabs), but of privacy itself. The reward? “Citizenship,” which in Starship Troopers is a code word for power.
The movie is both a critique of war and a celebration of war. An indictment of human cruelty and bloodlust, and at the same time a spectacular glorification of human cruelty and bloodlust. Starship Troopers cancels itself out at every turn, a blank text free and open and bottomless.
***
Rumpus original art by André Eamiello.
5 responses
“Starship Troopers cancels itself out at every turn, a blank text free and open and bottomless.”
Yes, exactly! One thing that bugs me about the film’s naysayers is their inability to acknowledge just that, or, if they do acknowledge it, their tendency to identify it as some kind of defect.
A film that argues with itself and reaches mutually-exclusive conclusions is a complex one.
@Tom: Or perhaps just an empty-headed one. Contradiction is not always a sign of complexity.
I think it’s hard to find a modern war movie which doesn’t walk away with a summing up something like ‘War is BAD! Uh, and also really really cool. Don’t ever do war! Unless, like, it’s time to do it and stuff, in which case hoo-ah and man up, pussies! But seriously we mean it, war is nasty and horrible and ooooh soooo prettty the explosions.’
Unambiguously holding a ‘war actually IS bad – or good’ position and holding to it would seem a much rarer and more complex thing to find.
I think there are degrees of contradiction, though, Nate.
Maybe all modern war movies want it both ways, I’m not sure. But many, like “Casualties of Warâ€, come down much more on the “atrocities†side, while others, like “Pearl Harbor†(Michael Bay) are more jingoistic. I don’t think that the contradiction (“war is bad; let’s fight!â€) is automatically a part of all modern war movies. If it is, it’s not uniform across all movies. Films like Missing in Action, G.I. Joe, Heartbreak Ridge, 300, the Rambo movies, and even Black Hawk Down don’t have much of the “war is bad†message.
War movies are about spectacle, and spectacles are, well, spectacular. Images of war are sublime, beautiful, something that the Futurists and others openly acknowledged. F.T. Marrinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto†is so telling in this regardd. Blood is red—that’s a very powerful color on the screen. It’s beautiful, spilled. The very act of making a modern war film is an act of fascism: there can be no depiction of war without its glorification.
But there are gradations, and Starship Troopers is incoherent, and, therefore, dangerous in a beautiful way. Its message is not the simple dichotomy (which I don’t think exists in most war films anyway) between “war is bad / war is really cool.†The film never really suggests that war is “bad.†Instead, the ironic, post-Vietnam audience wants to read it this way, to compensate for their guilt for liking to watch giant bugs tearing people in half and being ripped to shreds by guns. Of course we are taught that war is bad, but that it is sometimes necessary, to protect the homeland, etc. War is a “necessary evil.â€
But there is nothing really “evil†about the war in Starship Troopers. Verhoeven’s “critique†seems to come out most strongly in the recruitment videos, but are these really critiques, or do we desire to see them as critiques so that we can sit back and enjoy the violence?
Great analysis, Nicholas. I do want to add more to your third frame, as I have always interpreted that scene as Johnny being in utero and later being reborn and resurrected into the perfect soldier that he becomes in the second half of the movie. The way his body is floating inside the tank certainly resembles a baby in the uterus and the positioning of the surgical machine extends toward his belly button as a type of mechanical umbilical cord. The machine is similarly giving Rico back his life and replenishing his energy.
It’s always been a shot that stands out for me since it, as you phrased it, seems so “fantastically absurd” to have Rico floating in a tank when it could have been cheaper for the production to just put Rico on a table.
Good point, Michael, about the image of a baby (he’s almost naked, too) in a uterus. That entire sequence–especially the end when she plants a big kiss on the side of the tank–is creepy, because Johnny is so exposed, so overly-lit. He is conscious but helpless.
Nice work over at your blog. Keep it up.
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